Something somewhat resembling a blog post

 

Brain dead.  Brain, brain, brain dead.  Brain.  Brain?  Sigh.  I am hammering myself into the ground for your benefit* and am distinctly into the stage where the story is a lot more real than this . . . this . . . reality thing. 

Ithilien wrote:

'People say that life is the thing but I prefer reading' has been true all my, er, life, and is the personal entropy I have to resist

But it's not entropy!  Reading is connecting up all sorts of lovely things in your brain and even better, connecting up your brain with someone else's story through the words. Reading a story makes it alive, giving it reality and meaning and resonance. Perfectly virtuous. 

          Or at least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

You have an office job.  You can AFFORD to get all hooked up with a book.  You will be obliged to pull the wires off and climb out again.  If I didn't have to hurtle hounds and ring bells** and sing and so on I might very well disappear forever through the cracks in my keyboard.***  Reading can be a busperson's holiday for a writer, certainly†, and I also have to be careful what I'm reading when I'm writing hard because all those you-me-reality-story membranes get very thin and permeable and I may find myself writing LOTR where Merry really is a girl.  But mainly I have to remember that I'm still this-world REAL, whether I like it or not.††

            So by all means stick to your story.  But don't forget to go to work.†††   I'm sticking to mine too, warily, only mine has evil magicians and vampires and burning deserts and demesne usurpers and . . . I think I'm a little confused. 

Speaking of singing, EMoon wrote in response to last night's blog:

Moaning on key is better than moaning off key…says the person who was up very early listening to the morning moaning of cows while checking on the wildlife watering stations. The neighbor's cows (adjacent to our fence) in conversation with some distant cows (at least two fields west.) These cows do not "moo"….moo suggests coo suggests pleasant dove-like sounds, maybe in a lower key.

No, these cows make loud unfortunate sounds "Mooo-AWWWWWW!" "MOWWW-AWWWWW!" and "OooooouGHHHHH" and occasionally rapid loud resonant grunts that sound oddly like recordings of lions coughing on the veldt. "OUGH! OUGH! OUGH!"

I decided this morning that they were discussing the relative merits of their pastures, the number of predators, the shortage of water, etc. and amused R- by bawling out these comments in cow-voice during breakfast, when I came inside. (This is not good for singing voice, and is thus not a recommendation to Our Hellgoddess to try it.) "GOTTT GRAAAASSS?" "NOOOAWWWW!" "NOTTT USSS!" "WAAWTr?" "NOOAWWWWWW!" "DROWOWOWOWT!" "YAHHHHAWWWW!"

This was also mixed with the goats or sheep only one field away, who were bleating in that insane way of caprids or ovids who expect to be fed soon. "Nyah-ah-ah-ah!" "MMaa-aa-aa…" I can do goat-voice too…also not good for the singing voice.

::Falls down laughing.::  I didn't tell you, yesterday, that Nadia had been telling me about ways to teach kids things about singing and the voice.  One of them is how to make yourself breathe from the belly:  Bark.  If you bark properly:  RUFF.  RUFF.  RUFF RUFF RUFF, you will breathe from the belly, and you'll feel your belly muscles driving the ruff.  The other one is how to find your head voice:  whine.  You know that falling eeeemmm, eeeeemmm—I can't think how to spell it—noise that emphatically whining dogs make?  Chaos has a really good whine, he being a hellhound who frequently feels the world is not attending to him as it should.   You do that properly and you'll be doing it in your head voice.  So my voice teacher barked and whined at me and said she wouldn't make me do it—whereupon of course I did.  I haven't yet quite dared use either of these study aids at home however.  The dog bed is next to the piano anyway, and hellhounds already tend to hang over the end of it and stare at me while I sing.  Chaos—again, Chaos—will get out of the bed, come over to the piano, tip his head, and gaaaaaaze. . . . beseechingly?  I don't want to know.  But I think the barking and the whining might drive them too far. 

* * *

* Also so that the hellhounds could keep eating, supposing hellhounds wanted to keep eating.  Also I need to buy more books.^  And yarn. 

^ Alicia was exaggerating.  I don't have more than 9,999 books in my sitting room.  And I'm sure I could fit a sixth person in.  I have four chairs [two of them imported from the kitchen] and a two-person sofa, after all.  I might even conceivably fit in a seventh person.  So long as she was small.  And was willing to sit on the floor. 

katinseattle wrote:

I used to prefer to sit on the floor. . . . I'd say, "Because you can't fall off the floor," when people asked me why. But that was just an excuse. There's just something about sitting on the floor.

There is just something about sitting on the floor, especially in a household containing critters.  Most critters find floor-sitting humans appealing.  But I consider the not being able to fall off it more than just a remark.  I'm a fidget.  Sitting on an ordinary straight chair and fidgeting can be dangerous.+  If you're expecting me to SIT in a chair I need handbells.  Or knitting. 

+ b_twin wrote: 

I've always been a fast healer from bruises (often with nothing to show for the pain). 

Not me.  I used to turn blue and purple if you dropped a hat on me (in the infamous words of a very-long-ago boyfriend.  I could argue that it depended on the hat).   This is approximately the only drawback to arnica—the sacrifice of pity.  Pity sometimes produces gratifying results.  Cups of tea while you languish on the sofa.  Chocolate. Champagne. 

            There's a curious loop to self-prescribing arnica though.  Generally speaking it's good for injuries, full stop.  Give arnica to the toddler who just fell down and bumped her knee/nose/forehead.  Give arnica before and after the dentist.  Give arnica while you're waiting for the ambulance, alternating with tightening and loosening the tourniquet.  Arnica.  It is the answer.

            But one of the additional symptoms for arnica is the person who says no, no, I'm fine, while they're haemorrhaging from a severed femoral artery.  There's a sub class of people who need arnica because they think they don't.  If you are one of those people, it's very difficult to remember to take your arnica.  Since I really dislike being covered with bruises, I can usually remember to take the initial one or two or even three, depending on severity.  But then I decide oh, McKinley, stop being such a wet . . . and stop taking it. 

            Remind me, the next time I put my foot through an extra-large loop of All-Star shoelace and fall down# to take MORE arnica.  I can still only kneel on one knee—AND THIS FINGER IS A DEAD BORE.  Both of which are beyond what arnica can do at this point. 

# Did I ever recite my at-least-I-didn't litany for you?  At least I didn't fall in dog-horse-pony-deer-cat-sheep-cow-goat-fox-badger-hedgehog-rabbit-wild-boar crap.~  Most of which I see samples of most days on most walks. 

~ I don't think we have any wild boar around here, but if we did, I imagine its crap would be fairly epic.  

** Is this a handbell which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A handbell of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;

And such an instrument I was to use.

It's strange how well that works . . . 

Diane in MN wrote:

Calling Niall obsessive obviously fails to do him justice. Does his obsession extend to commentary? When do we get a guest blog out of him?

VERY GOOD QUESTION.  I'll ask him the next time . . . I'm buying the beer.  

*** Eh.  Awful lot of crumbs down here.  

† Possibly exacerbated by rampant jealousy, either of skill or of bank balance. 

†† There are drawbacks to being the person who wrote SUNSHINE, when you are also a person who tends to go home at about 3 a.m.  I keep thinking about the 9 mph rule.  Hellhounds and I don't move at anything like 9 mph as we amble down the hill from Wolfgang's parking space to the cottage front door.  And—I think I've mentioned this one before—there is always that moment, when I'm closing the door successfully behind us, that I close it just a little quicker because there might be something just about to . . . 

††† Birds have to eat too.